Right, you’re saying, because tooling around in a plush La-Z-Boy has so many practical uses, but extrapolate from this Kinect hack and you might imagine all sorts of serious medical applications–say motion-controlled stairlifts, or wheelchairs that respond to twists of your head. Also, less serious ones, say trips to the fridge for a …

For once, here’s a smartphone app that does something more productive than knocking over pig-built structures or killing time in a waiting room: A team of grad students across the country have adapted a Samsung Focus phone running Windows 7 to allow it to instantly diagnose malaria.

Well, that’s one way to beat the competition. According to Chinese trade website Digitimes, Apple had managed to delay the launch of the BlackBerry Playbook tablet by keeping touchscreen manufacturers so busy with iPad orders that they were too swamped to work on rival Blackberry’s tablet.

He’s invented code that doesn’t simply recognize faces, but can track them as they move around. Not just faces, either. Almost any object you define on screen can be monitored, tracked, and memorized for future use.

Here’s some surprising news about the war in Afghanistan: 1 in every 50 troops in the country is a robot. The use of robots in combat isn’t a new thing – consider the use of bomb-disposal robots or drone planes throughout the years – but according to CNN, there are also robots that exist just to get shot at, and robots that don’t need …

It’s taken…well, far too many years, actually, but Harry Potter might finally be getting around to entering the 21st century. The Scotsman newspaper reports that after years ignoring the format, JK Rowling is considering e-book versions of all seven installments of the series that made her name. The newspaper quotes Liz Thomson, editor …

If you live on the web, things might have just gotten more interesting. Some more screenshots of Windows 8 just leaked online, and it looks like Microsoft is seriously thinking about baking file syncing and web sharing straight in the new operating system.

If you find the majority of your Facebook friends annoying, here’s some potentially good news: You’re not alone.

A study of 400 women for daily deals company Eversave unexpectedly uncovered more information about participants’ distaste for their friends’ online behavior than about the impact social networking has on saving money …

Some companies would take a moment to catch their breath after managing to get 30 million customers online at the same time, but not Skype. After passing the 30,000,000 user online simultaneously milestone on Monday, the VoIP company has two different plans in the offing to keep itself ahead of the crowd.